Critics Suck, But Everyone Sucks More

[This post is the result of looking up Holmes & Watson on IMDb.]

We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.

Walt Disney

Critics suck. That’s not open for debate. But the internet took the old adage “Everyone’s a critic” and turned it into an ridiculous reality.

In its early years, it was good. Sites like IMDb were good. People had meaningful discourse about movies they liked (or disliked). Legend has it, some people even changed their minds during some of these conversations.

The world wasn’t binary. Flame wars were frowned upon or outright forbidden in online forums. They were considered gauche rather than de rigueur.

Then along came Twitter and Pinterest and a stack of other platforms to further destroy already shrinking attention spans. And shortly thereafter, nuance was dead. Except as an overused buzzword by those people who say synergy, disrupt, or binary at least four times a day. (The previous paragraph only uses one of those it once.)

Dialogue was dead, substance burned to the ground, and only the flames remained.

IMDb closed its message boards because people’s feeling were being hurt. (Also, they were also bought by Amazon.) Rotten Tomatoes recently deleted a zillion negative ratings and killed their “Want To See” metric because people were being mean to Brie Larson. (They were bought by NBCUniversal and Warner Bros.)

The middle-aged internet is a shell of its former self. Sure, it’s bigger, faster and flashier. But it’s nothing more than a slew of corporate-owned properties offering diminishing options and freedoms.

And people aren’t helping. They’ve devolved into giving a movie 1/10 or 10/10, and very few movies are either of those. Everything has to be The Best or The Worst ever. You must hate it or love it.

At least with critics, we get a thousand or so words of bullshit reasoning behind their ratings.

Every Female Character In Disney Pixar Films Has The Same Face, Apparently Not

This is a simple response to Patrick Smith’s post on Buzzfeed.

 

Cha Cha’s Trending Engine Needs a Bolt

Following a recommended link from a Twittermate, I found myself on Cha Cha today. I have never found the site particularly useful, informative or pleasing to look at, but I was quite surprised by it today. Among its top trending topics in Movies are A Nightmare on Elm Street, Grease, The Little Mermaid, Monsters, Back to the Future and Ghost.

Now, as it is just three days after Halloween I could maybe – maybe – understand Nightmare and Monsters trending, albeit unlikely. I’d rather expect to see more current horror films (Saw XX perhaps?) or more classic films, such as The Shining.  But I would also expect to see these films trending before and during Halloween, not half a week later.

Given Hollywood’s propensity for rehashing ideas and flogging dead horses, my first thought was “Damn, that’s a lot of remakes.” However, I clicked on a few only to discover there are no such remakes, reboots or sequels on the table. There is not a fourth installment of BTTF in the works, no next Nightmare, no bigger budget version of Monsters, and thankfully no revamping of Ghost.

My second thought, and my conclusion, is that there is no way these films are the trending topics in Movies in November 2012. I think Cha Cha needs to check under the hood of their Trending Engine – their Flux Capacitor might be broken.

Trending on November 3, 2012

Why people steal music (and other media). Part One.

I just bought Bob Mould’s new album Silver Age from Amazon.com (US store), my first solely digital music purchase ever. I had listened to it a few times on Grooveshark and knew I liked it so it was a no-brainer. Especially at five bucks. (Which, incidentally, is what an album should cost.) I bought it through my Amazon US account for a few reasons:

In Amazon, The Cloud has borders

1. I have a Kindle Fire and it only connects to the US store (thanks Amazon!).
2. The US store has a cloud player where I can keep my music and stream it on my devices.
3. Fuck Apple.

After purchase, it was immediately available for me to download or to stream through the Amazon Cloud Player built into the Amazon site. It was also immediately available in the same ways on my Kindle Fire as its music player has a native cloud player. Brilliant. All very simple, friendly and handy. Until I stepped outside the narrow bounds of digital “ownership”.

My Kindle Fire, of course, was purchased in the US as I Am Canadian and living in Japan. As such, all my digital purchases must be made through my American Amazon account. This requires me to consider currency exchange rates which is naturally something I’d prefer to avoid. But so be it, the banks have got to make money somehow (or everyhow). But that is not what annoyed me here. What pissed me off with this purchase was that when I went to listen to it on my Samsung Galaxy S3 (Japan Edition) I discovered the Amazon Cloud Player is not available for this device. Because… I am in Japan and The Cloud is… not really “the cloud” as perpetuated by all these cloud companies. Granted, it is not a huge hurdle for me to listen to my purchase on my Galaxy. I simply need to download the MP3s of the album and transfer them to my phone. But that is not the point.

The Cloud: Your data. Anyplace. Anytime. (Available with internet connection only. Some restrictions apply, including international boundaries, model of phone, model of PC, model of portable media player, model of economics, model of particle physics, country of purchase, country of residence, bandwidth restrictions, whims of the artist, whims of the capitalist, and/or whims of the pirate. Some charges may be incurred depending on service provider, location, time of day, weather, and genre.)

In a time when Newsweek has just announced that it is shedding it’s dry, paper skin and going purely digital next year, the move from hardcopy to softcopy is but a foregone conclusion for most. After all, dead tree media received its unflattering sobriquet for a reason. However, traditional industry thinkers have been scrambling about for the past 15 years wondering how they are going to charge people for their product if it’s not something tangible you could use to squash a bug. And they think Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the answer. It is not. All DRM does is piss off the people who are paying for their product. If The Pirates had to devise a scheme in which they could convince everyone to eschew paying for content and download their free stuff instead, they could not come up with something better than DRM.

Other content companies could learn something from Comedy Central. While watching The Daily Show (legally, online, for free, in Japan) I was inundated with MTV ads featuring American pop duo Karmin. As I am not a huge fan of such pop music I complained about the annoying ads to a friend of mine. She’d never heard of them before. Later, she searched for them online. Then heard their music. And bought their album. In Japan. Because of an ad from America viewed online in Japan by a Canadian who didn’t even like it.

To be continued in Part Two.

The Cleveland Indians racial sensitivity

“I have long appreciated the deep reservoir of racial sensitivity that is the Cleveland Indians.“

– Stephen Colbert

RIP Vic Tayback

Vic Tayback died from a heart attack 22 years ago. I never knew. Here’s to ya, Mel.